The ARMv8-A microarchitecture allows for a more energy-efficient device, but their unfamiliarity with it may have been the reason why the Opteron A1100 was delayed almost 18 months.Today’s launch marks the end of that protracted development process.

The AMD Opteron A1100 Revealed

The AMD Opteron A1100 was designed around the ARM Cortex-A57 processor cores to deliver better power efficiency and lower costs. Coupled with enterprise-class features, AMD is hoping that it will allow them to penetrate the datacenter or hyperscale computing market.

The AMD Opteron A1100 processor will feature up to 8 ARM Cortex-A57 processor cores, backed by up to 4 MB of shared L2 cache and a large 8 MB L3 cache. Its dual-channel memory controller supports up to 128 GB of DDR3 or DDR4 memory.

Connectivity-wise, it supports two 1o Gb Ethernet ports, a single PCI Express 3.0 slot and up to 14 SATA3 devices. Take a look at the Opteron A1100 chip diagram

Here are the market segments that AMD plans to target with the Opteron A1100 SoC. Basically anyone who wants a cheap, efficient SoC for massive deployments.

To support those solutions, AMD has already prepared a complete solution stack. This is what probably took them so long to qualify the Opteron A1100 for the enterprise market.